Edmund Rice Education Australia Touchstone

Liberating Education

As a Catholic School in the Edmund Rice Tradition, we are committed to promoting an integral ecology through demonstrating a deep reverence for the earth as both God’s work and our home, promoting ecojustice and working towards a sustainable and regenerative future for all creation.

EREA Climate Crisis Statement

The EREA Climate Crisis Statement was launched on 19 August 2021. The Statement speaks to us with hope and optimism grounded in a call for renewed and reimagined action. It has been developed over 18 months through consultation with over 1600 young people from EREA schools and various other members of our school communities. We are seeking a shift in attitudes and actions, to address the climate crisis and to restore harmony to God’s creation. The statement will guide the work that we do with students over the coming years in raising awareness about associated with ecological sustainability

The image links below provide access to the Climate Crisis Statement and a promotional video which includes students from St Edward’s College.

Climate Crisis Response Statement

Climate Crisis Response Video

Learning Reflections and Learning Conferences

Our College Aspiration Statement challenges us as a learning community to inspire our boys to be curious, respectful and autonomous learners who demonstrate resilience, discipline and perseverance on their learning journey in an environment which fosters positive relationships and focuses on the wellbeing of staff and students. This statement has provided us with the guiding principles upon which our approach to Home-Based learning has been implemented. Our focus has been to establish learning experiences which are delivered online which require students to take responsibility for their learning in an environment in which they feel supported to achieve their personal best. We have purposefully adopted the approach of meeting with students online in each lesson to provide guidance about the learning experiences for the lesson with the added benefit of being able to check in with their level of motivation, engagement and wellbeing.

Students have been required to take responsibility for their learning in a manner which many of them have never been challenged before. We are very proud of their commitment to their learning and it is completely understandable that their level of motivation and engagement may have fluctuated throughout the extended period of HBL. The Learning Reflections which will be followed by the Learning Conferences in Term 4 are designed to encourage students to reflect on themselves as a learner and it has been very pleasing to read many of their observations. Their comments provide great evidence of their capacity to think deeply about their learning when given the opportunity.  I have included unedited examples of student reflections below as an example of the type of learning and thinking we aim to promote.

Year 7 Students

A topic that I am proud of was Algebra. This is because the tasks were challenging but fun at the same time and by the end I felt very smart.

We do lots of writing in English and the more topics we do the more proud I get of my work. At the start of the year my writing wasn’t very good but now I am really good at writing and hope to improve more in this subject. English is getting a strong subject with me and I hope it continues.

I show independence in math and show initiative. I show that I can work problems out by myself but if I need help I will ask for it. I can usual figure it out if I just keep trying and focusing on my work I will get it done and finish the task.

 A task that l am proud of completing is the Minecraft coding assessment. l am proud of this because it was a really big grind to get it done, it was also a lot of fun.

I’m proud of completing my plant because it is going pretty well right now and it has been successful.

Year 8 Students

 I enjoy math because I like solving problems using my mind.

 A time that I have shown independence and initiative is during my research for my science research task.

 I’ve found that maths has been challenging because I’ve found that it isn’t exciting online compared to face to face, but I haven’t seen the same problem with my other subjects.

A topic or activity that i found interesting was… the practical and gym home based learning tasks. I enjoy doing physical activity and liked making myself a program during class and also completing it.

Year 9 Students

I enjoy my learning in this subject because I can learn how to construct pieces and think creatively

Currently in Maths we are learning trigonometry and learning the use of finding unknown sides, sin, cos, and tan. I feel like I am doing very well in this topic and I am finding it interesting and quite fun as I it is enjoyable being able to solve problems like this.

 A task or piece of work that I am proud of completing is my speculative fiction creative writing. I am proud of it because I thought I completed it to the best of my ability.

 I am quite proud of my ability to play guitar and I’m very proud of my PRAC submission where I play ‘Crazy Train’. Despite joining quite late in the year I feel like I’m confident in most of my music ability and I’ve tried my hardest to do my very best in this subject as I am quite passionate about it.

 I love learning in French class as learning a new language is extremely interesting and I get to learn about French culture as well. I am proud of my abilities in French and I really enjoy how the class is fun and how well we all get along.

Year 10 Students

A topic or activity I found interesting was the topic of evolution. It completely fascinated me. I enjoy my learning in this subject because religion isn’t always about being right or wrong. Religion and tasks we study is often up to interpretation. This term we have had the freedom to work on a topic that we choose, this helped keep me enthusiastic and interested as I chose a topic I am passionate about.

I have shown initiative and independence in PDHPE by completing all the required tasks for both practical and theory lessons in my online OneNote Notebook

I enjoy my learning in this subject because I find the information we are learning relevant to the world we live in. I find the information applicable to situations that I will probably live through.